How strong is support for democracy?

We are collecting our thoughts about what's next for democracy following the 2024 election and will take up the question during our end-of-year episode in December.

Democracy Works host Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State talks with Christopher Claassen, a political scientist at the University of Glasgow, about how to measure support for democracy across countries and across generations. 

Claassen grew up in South Africa and was 16 when the country held its first democratic elections. His interest in democracy continued through college and into his career as a political scientist. Today, he is a professor of political behavior at the University of Glasgow. One area of his research focuses on how to measure support for democracy. In a recent paper, he and colleagues developed 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project in an effort to refine what people mean when they say the support or don't support democracy.

Berkman and Claassen also discuss how support for democracy is part of the 2024 U.S. election. Note that this interview was recorded in late October 2024 before the election took place.

Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle for this episode. I am handing the microphone over to my colleague and co host, Michael Berkman, who is the Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State. Michael spoke with Chris Claassen, who is a professor of political behavior at the University of Glasgow. Chris grew up in South Africa and was a teenager when the country held its first fully democratic election in the 1990s and his interest in democracy has really stuck with him throughout his professional career. One of his areas of focus is how to measure support for democracy. This is something that Michael and his colleague Eric Plutzer have studied in the McCourtney Institute's Mood of the Nation Poll. You've probably heard us talk about that on the show before, so it's interesting in this conversation to hear about the interplay between what Michael and Eric found in the poll and what Chris and colleagues have found in their research. Chris has a new paper on conceptualizing and measuring support for democracy that was published earlier this year in the Journal of comparative political studies, and we will link to that in the show notes. One final note, Michael and Chris do talk a little bit about the 2024 election, and just to let you know that the interview was recorded before the election took place. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this conversation between Michael Berkman and Chris Claassen.

Michael Berkman
So Chris, I'm excited to talk with you today about a topic we've been working on in the mood of the nation poll, and that is trying to get a handle on support for democracy. Our focus, our focus is on the United States, but I know yours is on the US and democracies throughout the world. So I'm going to learn a lot from you today. I want to start by laying out the terrain a little bit. What do you mean when we talk about support for democracy? Is that like when someone tells me they're happy with what the Biden administration has done, or they look back favorably on the Trump presidency? Or is it something else?

Chris Claassen
Yeah, it is something else. It's it's something more general. So you know, instead of, if we think of it as like a game of sports, it's not the players or the teams, it's the rules of the game. And so it's democracy itself. It's the rules that structure the competition between parties, between candidates, whether people are in favor of democracy, whether they favor free competition between parties, between candidates, freedom of speech and all the other rights that buttress that, or whether maybe they're ambivalent or perhaps even sort of nostalgic for authoritarianism or outright favoring some kind of authoritarian leader. So that's really what support for democracy is. It's a broader thing about the rules of the game itself. Okay?

Michael Berkman
So I can be unhappy with what an administration is doing, but still support democracy. Still support the game that we're all playing together. 

Chris Claassen
Absolutely. You know, there's long been a distinction between two kinds of support. You know, the one form of support is for the people in power, the government of the day. And, you know, political scientists call that specific support, so you and the idea is, you know, your specific support may go up and down. That's part of democracy. Maybe you favor the government, maybe you don't. That's normal. Some people are going to be unhappy. But there's another kind of support, and this is where it's a support for democracy fits in. It's a form of diffuse support. So it is support for the system itself. And it's thought that, you know, the system generally doesn't change, or maybe it changes slowly. And that is the rules of democracy, the rules that structure the competition, the rules that determine who gets voted in as the government. So generally, we think that it's okay if people have low specific support, that will rise and fall. That's part of democracy, but we generally think it's good that people have high diffuse support, so support for the system needs to be high, and if it isn't, then, well, there may be trouble. 

Michael Berkman
Yeah, let's say more about that. So on this show, we've had discussions with different people about democratic backsliding on voting restrictions that limit democracy on personal parties and how that contributes to democratic decline. You're talking about something different, public support. Why? Why is it important to a healthy democracy, a consolidated democracy that people support it.

Chris Claassen
Well, I guess there's long been a, I suppose, an assumption among political thinkers, not just political scientists, but going back really a long time. I mean, you can certainly trace it back to Montesquieu in the middle ages about a link between. In culture and democracy. So the way in which people think about politics and the kind of system they have, whether it's democratic or some other form of government. So this has long been an assumption that people have had about politics. I guess you know, when it comes to the modern era, there's been a concern that if democracy doesn't enjoy a large majority of support amongst the public, it will create a window of opportunity for, you know, authoritarian actors, maybe elected autocrats, who will dismantle some checks and balances, because, of course, it helps them stay in power. And so over time, you would see sort of democracy democratic rights and institutions erode, and democracy itself would cease to cease to exist. 

Michael BerkmanYeah. So my sense of that is that if people have low support for democracy, they're less likely to say, punish a political elite who takes undemocratic actions, or they're unlikely to be disturbed by violations of democratic norms. And is that a way of thinking about it? 

Chris Claassen
I think that's certainly one way it could play out. You could see it as an electoral action where people will vote against a candidate who is proposing undemocratic actions or has if it was an incumbent who has taken his attack democracy. So that's certainly one way it could play out. You might also see it in terms of collective action protest, and we do. There's been plenty of examples of democracy protests. So I'm from South Africa, and the anti apartheid movement, a big part of that was a protest for more democratic rights and more political equality the Philippines in the 1980s so there's a lot of examples of strong democracy protests. So there, what we have is a slightly different dynamic, where it's not people taking action to protect an existing democracy. They're taking action to demand a democracy be installed, where one maybe doesn't exist already. So you could potentially have two different processes. And we think, you know, traditionally, support for democracy was thought more to operate as a way of as a bulwark, a way of protecting democracy, but potentially it could also be a way of allowing democracies to emerge, or forcing them to emerge

Michael Berkman

 I mean, my sense is that polarization sort of increases the risks of a low level of Democratic support. There's some experiments in, certainly in American politics, where the most polarized people, so people on the most extreme ends of polarization, will be the most tolerant of anti democratic actions, because the prospects of the other side winning or just too much for them to take in effect?

Chris Claassen
Yes, absolutely. So I'd say one of the most important developments in this line of research are these experiments by Milan svolik and others. And I think they've really shown that. So I guess traditionally, we thought that people's attitudes to democracy were maybe independent of their attitudes to policy, their ideology, their partisanship. But what showed with his experiments is that maybe there's, you know, people trade off between these dimensions, and they can say, well, if my candidate, if the candidate who supports my vision, is elected, do I really mind if they're a bit of an autocrat? Maybe that, you know, they'll get they'll win the next election as well. So I think it really made us question, you know, what is support for democracy and whether it can handle an environment where polarization is in play, because that would really exacerbate that trade off between, you know, the democratic rights and maybe you know, your own personal interests in getting someone from your ideological tribe in office.

Michael BerkmanSo let's go back in American politics a bit. Robert Dahl, very well, esteemed scholar of American politics, writing in the early 1960s and you know, as I read him, he's talking about a high agreement around democracy. And so I'm just going to give two quotes of his he said, to reject the democratic creed is, in effect, to refuse to be an American. He wrote that in 1961 right in the heart of the Cold War, which I think is important to this story, and it's nearly impossible to find an American. He said this in 1966 nearly impossible to find an American who says he is opposed to democracy or favors some alternative. On the contrary, nearly everyone professes to believe that democracy is the best form of government. So is it fair to say that back in 1960 support for democracy in the US was really quite high, but it's dropped. Well, actually, you may not have data going back to the 1960s.

Chris Claassen

I was just going to say so yeah, they didn't, actually,

Michael Berkman
You don't have that, yeah.

Chris Claassen
Myself and Pedro Michaelis have looked into this support for democracy in the United States over time, and then also within generations. And what we So, what we find is that, you know, over time, it has dropped quite markedly in the United States. It's on in aggregate. So the American public, you know, the first data we have is from the 1990s and at that point, you know, the United States support for democracy was one of the higher levels of support in the world. So certainly, you know, when comparing it with developing countries, a lot higher, but even higher, compared with some other established democracies. And then our data go up to about 2020 and we see quite a marked decline in American support for democracy, down to about average levels in global terms, and comparing it to other wealthy democracies, one of the lower levels amongst that group. So I think it is fair to say in aggregate, there has been a decline. And, you know, to go back to dolls quote, I think you absolutely do find today people you know in surveys who explicitly endorse undemocratic leaders and say they would prefer it. They do it in every country. But now, you know, in some of the questions, you see about 20% of Americans giving those kind of responses,

Michael Berkman
So let's, let's follow up on that. You said a lot. There was a lot in there. But I want to first start with this idea of, like, how you even measure this, right? It's a very complicated concept, whether you support democracy. You've looked at a whole range of ways of asking this question. Could you give some idea about how we go about doing this in political science? 

Chris Claassen
Absolutely so. I guess the way in which we've done it for many years is to ask directly about different regimes. To ask, do you support democracy itself, or do you would you support democracy? Or do you think that maybe an authoritarian regime or dictatorship, the wording varies would be preferable. So generally, it's asking about regimes as a whole. And these are the questions which actually can be traced back to the to the 1980s these particular questions when after the what we call the third wave of democratization. So it was. It started in southern Europe with Greece, Portugal and Spain, which were military dictatorships in the early 70s, and then they transformed into democracies, and it proved to be the first of a big wave of democratization. But what happened is political scientists in southern Europe were concerned about the stability of these regimes, so they instituted a set of surveys where they developed these questions, asking about support for democracy, or perhaps preference for a dictatorship in their field. Of them for the first time in these countries in the 1980s and then, of course, a few years later, we saw the fall of the Cold War, and suddenly there's all these new democracies in Eastern Europe, but also some in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America, and there was great interest in in political science, but also, I think, amongst funders about, you know whether these democracies were sustainable, what was the political culture like, and the tools, the techniques they turned to were These questions developed in southern Europe, asking directly about regimes, asking about do you support democracy? Would you prefer an authoritarian regime? What about a military dictatorship? So it's asking about regimes as a whole. And all kinds of comparative survey projects blossomed. They tended to be called barometers. So there was the East Asia barometer, the afro barometer, and by the end of the 1990s there was a wide array of measures done in many different countries. Interestingly, if I may add one thing, at that time, there was no real interest in measuring support for democracy in developed democracies, like the United States, though.

Michael Berkman
Just to be a kind of a feature of a developed democracy, that's right, the actually a wealthy developed democracy.

Chris Claassen
The concept was this consolidated democracy. So the idea was there's a sort of limbo. You go through a period and you emerge into this heavenly state of consolidated democracy, from which you can't return. And so it was thought, well, the United States and much of western Europe, they've been democracies for a long time, and we don't need to ask about it, but almost by accident, these countries were included in some of these cross national projects. So we do have data going back, fortunately, because as we see these interesting patterns.

Michael Berkman
So you're tracing this sort of long term decline in support for democracy in the United States going back to around 2000 and is it fair to say, driven by younger people that are coming in that are less supportive of democracy, but don't grow out of it? 

Chris Claassen
In effect, that's exactly right. So it is a, what we call a generational pattern. And the idea of a generational pattern is there's an impressionable period, and usually it's thought to be between, say, the ages of 16 and 24 and that's when most of your political attitudes are formed, certainly things like support for democracy, which are thought to be quite fixed. And we do see this generational change. And. In the United States, but actually going back, you know, depending on different measures and models and so on, to probably about the 1960s or so. So Jenna, each generation after the next, has lower support for democracy. And, you know, there's no real age effect. So what we're saying is that it doesn't really change over the life course, and the real change we're seeing is driven by generational patterns in the United States at least.

Michael Berkman
Wow. So every generation coming in, and we've seen this in our mood of the nation poll data as well that you're able to look over time, but we're looking just cross sectionally at one period of time, but we consistently find that younger people are less supportive of democracy on a range of different questions than older people. I didn't put that younger generations and older generations. I'm really curious about some of your thoughts about why this is going on. And let me start this way. You met with some of our students yesterday to talk about this. Did this argument about them being like, not very supportive of democracy, resonate with them.

Chris Claassen
So, you know, we talked about the findings I had done research on regarding generational change. And actually, the data sort of end. And, you know, 2020, and it doesn't really directly, young people today aren't in those samples, but they gave all sorts of factors they thought might be a play in potentially expanding further declines. For example, one student described a social media environment where authoritarian actors are overtly making undemocratic appeals to American audiences, and this is part of the media landscape that I think is brand new and is in this country. And you would think, you know, it's interesting what effects it'll have, but I worry it'll have a bad effect.

Michael Berkman
You know, we had Jenna will put it in the show notes, but we had a guest on several months ago from Arizona State, I believe that works on sort of see social media spaces and extremism. And one of the things she taught us about in that in that discussion, was that even in these kinds of spaces that seem completely apolitical, wrestling, or, you know, MMA, I guess they call it, or right, the mixed mixed martial arts, thank you, mixed martial law, or even cooking shows that they have inserted into them these kind of anti democratic, sort of authoritarian messages. And so that seems very consistent with what you're saying they're experiencing in social media. But of course, this decline is going on longer than really social media.

Chris Claassen
Absolutely. Yeah, social media cannot explain the findings we reach, because very few of those samples would have had really had a version into social media. 

Michael Berkman
Exactly. So I know we both sort of agree that there's some kind of socialization going on here. And so, you know, I'll introduce a little bit of this, and we could talk about it in the mood of the nation poll. We've been asking people what democracy means to them, and we too have identified a sort of generational difference. And we we find that older Americans, who we suggest because they grew up in the Cold War, think about democracy in sort of terms, as an alternative to totalitarianism, right? I mean, just everybody talked about how the 1960s was all about freedom. It was a rhetorically, a god term without contestation. It was, you know, the language of the times was freedom and and so we're not surprised that when we ask people that are older, what does democracy mean to you, they often give responses that have something to do with freedom, like, you know, the Bill of Rights is what it means to me, or the freedom to do what I want to do. And that's how they see democracy, but that younger people are giving us different answers that have more to do with voice and participation, and we suggest that that hat that's happening because they were not socialized to politics during the Cold War, they were socialized in a much more contested time of emerging rights for different groups and voice for Different groups. What do you How does that argument resonate with kind of what you're doing?

Chris Claassen
Yeah, I had the opportunity to read your paper recently. I thought it was very compelling argument, you know. I guess it's, you know. So liberty is this, is this ideal? And of course, the Cold War struggle was something larger than democracy. It was existential, almost. So you know this, if democracy got associated or tied up in that conflict, you could see how you get universal support. And you also show that over time, the value of political equality became more important, which has always been an important. Democratic value. But political equality brings with it notions of competition, and it's sort of regular politics. It's, it means, you know, people competing, winners and losers, and that's part of democracy. You know, democracy is not always good to the average person on the street, but that, you know, it stands to reason that you would have an amelioration of support, maybe a regression to the mean you know, your article also reminded me of some of the findings from another study from Taiwan, of all places where you know, one of the benefits of doing this comparative research, you learn all kinds of interesting facts about how democracy or the meanings of democracy in different places. So in Taiwan, the main political division is between attitudes to China. Should the island be closer to China, or should it be very strongly opposed and maybe move towards independence? That's the main political cleavage. It turns out democracy is closely related to that divide. So if you're very anti China, you very in favor of democracy in Taiwan, because that is how you distinguish yourself from mainland China. Now, if you're more sympathetic towards China, you're less supportive of democracy. So here we see another another country where democracy itself is becomes associated with the broader conflict. So of course, you know, people interpret it partially through that lens, you know? And I think this probably happens in a lot of places. 

Michael Berkman
And so democracy is maybe a little bit more of a contested term, and they're less likely to grow up with the same sort of full support for it, because it is so contested, right? I mean, the fight for rights, the right fight for voice, is always those are, those are some of the toughest fights in politics. 

Chris Claassen
So yeah, in the United States, it would bring with it connotations of a more contested kind of politics. It's not the United States versus the Soviet Union, it's Democrats versus Republicans. And you know, and that's part of democracy, but it obviously leads to a little more opposition than we previously saw.

Michael Berkman
And maybe a decline of people being able to say that they really support democracy,

Chris Claassen
Yes, because, yeah, that ideal of, you know, liberty, that thing that transcends the divisions within the country that is not being emphasized when you move away From this notion of it as this distinguishing feature of the United States versus the Soviet Union, the Cold War conflict. So perhaps it's, you know, contrarian view would be. Perhaps it's not terribly surprising in the United States to see that decline, given you know these findings around the Cold War.

Michael Berkman
Are we asking the wrong question to understand their support for democracy. I mean, are we asking questions that maybe resonate more strongly in a positive way for people that were raised at a different time and that maybe they really do support democracy? I mean, certainly they are. You know, I think it's fair to say that many younger people today are very focused on voice and participation and protest, and we see increased voting. We see increased participation from them in American politics lately. But are we asking the right question?

Chris Claassen
I think it is time to maybe ask more nuanced, finely grain questions about support for democracy. And the reason is, democracy is a very complex concept. Some of the rights are almost antagonistic at times, say, a majoritarian right like you know electoral rights, the majority voice will prevail, contrasted with minoritarian institutions like judicial oversight, where potentially a judge can overrule a popular elected legislator. So democracy is complex, so it stands to reason people will latch onto different aspects of it at different times. But there's also this issue, as we see with the United States and the Cold War in Taiwan and its struggle with China, that democracy gets associated with broader conflicts, and that's just how it is. So I think when we ask him questions, a fruitful Avenue would be to ask about the rights and institutions that constitute liberal democracy. And these are well known rights, the right to vote, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, freedom of association, some of the minoritarian rights or the checks and balances like the judicial oversight of a Congress or the legislature or the very whether the Congress or legislature can review president's decisions. All of these things are important rights and institutions, and by asking about them directly, I think we might get a fuller, more nuanced picture of support for democracy in different countries. 

Michael Berkman
In addition, it's hard to do because people support everything well, right? When you ask them, do you support the right to vote? Yes. Do you support that? 

Chris Claassen
It may be. It may. I think, with certain question wordings, you can encourage you know, the reluctant authoritarians to come. I'm out of the hazard, so to speak. So, you know, one of the classic arguments against universal suffrage is, well, everyone is, you know, poorly informed or easily misled. And it turns out, when you ask Americans that question, something like 15 to 20% agree that we should question universal suffrage, which seems extraordinary.

Michael Berkman

Yes, that seems like a high number.

Chris Claassen
It is. If you asked directly about, you know, would you support the universal right to vote, I think you would find less than 5% disagree with that. So a lot of it is asking questions in a certain way or certain measurement techniques that allow people to think about counter arguments to, you know, the widely accepted values or rights that they've heard about, because, of course, these are the arguments that will be put forth by, you know, authoritarian leaders who's looking to dismantle these rights and institutions. Yeah.

Michael Berkman
Well, one thing that interests me about young people's support for a democracy that is really based upon voice and participation and majority rule, which is what we kind of learn are the values that they really talk about is that it runs up against the political system in the United States that's designed not to respond to majorities. Right? There's so much about that's built into our constitution that is anti majoritarian. Supreme Court is anti majoritarian us one of the few countries that have a constitution modeled on the US that has not term limited its Supreme Court, for example, or that has not weakened the power of its upper chamber, like the House of Lords in Britain, in Britain, or that has not restricted other sort of anti majoritarian aspects of their government, but in the US, we have a lot of anti majoritarian elements built into the system. Seems like a recipe for frustration. 

Chris Claassen
Indeed, that makes a lot of sense. However, I would look back at the kind of longitudinal over time evidence, and note that with the same institutions and same tendencies, you would see fairly high levels of support for democracy in 1990s and United States, and if we believed all perhaps even higher levels back in the 1960s so there may be something more complex at play. There's institutions interacting with something like polarization. Yeah, it's a little beyond our grasp at the moment

Michael Berkman
It is a hard thing to get at, I mean, but my sense would be that if what I really value about democracy is freedom from socialization in the Cold War, I've got to feel like I got it right, because we won. And relative to the rest of the world, we often look at ourselves as the freest country on earth. I mean, Americans speak like that, yeah, but for people whose notion of democracy is more built around voice or majority control, they're the ones that are most likely to be frustrated by anti majoritarian institutions. That's the way I've been thinking about it.

Chris Claassen
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And if we're seeing generational change in people's the aspects of democracy, their value, or the meanings of democracy as the argument you've made, then that would certainly help explain these generational patterns.

Michael Berkman
I agree. Yeah, as you move ahead with your work, in particular on democracy, what are some of the outstanding questions you want to pursue now you gave me some ideas when you some ideas when you talked about, we need more nuanced measures of democracy.

Chris Claassen

Is that kind of, you know, going back to one of your original questions about, What will people do, like, what are the behaviors that support for democracy leads to? And I think this is a real unanswered question. And you know, whether it's voting maybe against your interests, to punish an undemocratic leader, or collective action to protest an elected president who's dismantling rights. These sort of behaviors require an emotional response, outrage, and then you have to think what kinds of what's going to lead to that outrage? And I tend to think it's something about values, maybe. So you know the values associated with democracy, which could be freedom, it could be equality, to the extent those values are seen to be violated by leaders or by candidates, I think that's where people will rise up and people will change their votes. So I think that should be an avenue that we could explore, looking at democratic values, maybe in a fairly granular sense, and asking which are the kinds of values that will lead people to be outraged, as opposed to just accepting it or not noticing.

Michael Berkman
We're in the middle of a presidential campaign. Good time to visit Pennsylvania.

Chris Claassen
Absolutely right.

Michael Berkman
We have campaign signs here. We have quite the, quite the quite the campaign going on. In some ways, democracy seems to be on the ballot that there are opposing views about democracy between. Democrats and Republicans right now, and at least some of Donald Trump language. Donald Trump's language is just totally anti democratic, and Kamala Harris is frequently attacking him for that. And so I'm wondering just what are your thoughts about this American campaign in terms of democracy, and is it healthy for a democracy, that the issue that one of the issues that people are battling about in a partisan way, is whether or not is the kind of democracy we're going to have that kind of question.

Chris Claassen
I mean, I think it's potentially a healthy thing to talk about democracy as something which can rise and fall, rather than, Oh, it's a given, and it's been their way forever. But however, I would say, when it's, you know, when you have only two candidates, and there's a stark choice between two different ideologies, and then you know democracy as well. That makes it more difficult. And makes it, it gets confounded the two, you know. So you could imagine a scenario where there's multiple candidates and one or two are undemocratic, but there's multiple ideological choices, and I think that would probably be a better option. So I'm giving you a hypothetical that doesn't exist, but I think it, I take your point that you know, having to think about democracy and maybe act on it is not necessarily a bad thing, and I think there is something positive about it.

Michael Berkman
I mean, we have read and learned a lot about the fact that the American democracy has declined some being on by any measure, V-DEM, or which has been mentioned on the podcast before any of these sort of big social science projects that try to measure democracy across multiple countries, the American democracy has declined and is not the healthiest in the world by a long shot. So I guess it makes sense that some of that is really entering into the political discourse and into the onto the into the presidential campaign like it's finally making sense to people like, wow. You know, the American democracy is not what it used to be.

Chris Claassen
So I wouldn't necessarily overstate that. I would say there's, there's certainly a threat, but we need to put it in context, comparing it to Brazil under Bolsonaro, where we saw dramatic declines Poland Hungary recently, whereas institutions being dismantled, media judges, civil society attack.

Michael Berkman
So that's, I think guard rails here are a lot stronger, there are a lot stronger.

Chris Claassen
And the actual decline is relatively minor in observable, changes, so I think that needs to be born.

Michael Berkman
That is true, but the rhetoric seems to be much more heated about democracy.

Chris Claassen
Yeah, but is there a way of seeing that as maybe a healthy symptom, like a fever, that is troubling at the time, but actually wards off the disease, where in other settings you wouldn't have the fever, you wouldn't have the rhetoric, because it's so much easier to dismantle institutions. 

Michael Berkman
Yeah, so it's, that's a really, really interesting point.

Chris Claassen
Yeah, the weapons of the week, if you will. If we don't think of presidential candidates here as weak, but maybe, you know, the rhetoric is the most powerful weapon they have. Maybe it is quite hard for them to actually change, the courts and change civil society and the media, and that's probably a good thing.

Michael Berkman
Well, Chris, thank you very much. This has been a fascinating discussion for me.

Chris Claassen
Thanks for having me.

Michael Berkman
For Democracy Works. I'm Michael Berkman. Thank you for joining us.

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